Yet on most days he was like any broad-shouldered lad you’d ever known, with his manners and a sweet laugh. So fine for speaking, you asked him things just to hear what words he’d pick out in answer, for they’d be not the ones you expected. His face was pretty as a girl’s, especially around the eyes. He had delicate hands despite the kitchen work, what people call “piano hands,” though Mrs. Bittle had a piano and he didn’t play a note.
Miss McKellar was sweet on him I believe, but all her offers to press his collars got her hands upon nothing but his shirts, so far as I know. Reg Borden was overly curious about his failure to serve. Reginald’s own excuse was a glass eye. And Mr. Judd, of course too old. That poor man remained confused about which war was presently on the go. They needled Mr. Shepherd about not serving, and a foreigner in the house was something they frowned on behind his back, but Mrs. Bittle maintained he was not the bad type of foreigner, Jap or Italian. Germans she was queasy on, they ought to be bad she said, but of course they owned the hardware downtown, and no one saying you couldn’t buy a ten-penny nail. In all, the men and Mrs. Bittle liked the cooking, and that swayed them.
They did press him on the lack of a fiancée, given his youth and vigor. Mr. Borden would raise this at supper, to Mr. Shepherd’s mortification. I defended against the charge. I had been unwed all but one year of my life entire, and I informed the gentleman I could see the advantages. Miss McKellar had her theories: a broken heart or a girl back in Old Mexico. All we really knew of this young man was that he had a prior life in that country, and cooking was his talent, second only to making himself unseen.
To earn pocket money he taught Spanish lessons at the Asheville Teachers College, an establishment of good reputation where I also worked, up until the war. I was secretary to the administrator and recommended Mr. Shepherd to her as a person of decent character, which was all I knew. Spanish was a less fashionable language than French, so he only came to teach two days each week. He made no impression on the office staff.
His third talent was well hidden. For three years we all resided in the same house, passed in the upstairs hallway to use the bath, sat in matched parlor chairs on Monday evenings to hear The Voice of Firestone over NBC. And we never once saw him draw ink into a fountain pen. If he owned a typewriter I never heard it, and it’s not a sound that gets past my ear. I know a Royal from a Smith-Corona from the next room. He wrote nothing in those years. This I know, for he later told me. He was dispirited of his past and stopped keeping the journals after everything was lost.
He’d brought up from Mexico a crate for a painting given him by Mrs. Kahlo, but hadn’t opened it. That might seem strange to others. Not to me. He wasn’t susceptible to suspense the way most are. If you gave him a package and said, Don’t open that till Christmas, he wouldn’t shake it. Something in his nature just did not expect good things in store. He set the crate in his wardrobe closet, leaving Mrs. Bittle to run the duster around it on her weekly rounds. There was no use in any of us having paintings. Mrs. Bittle wouldn’t let us pound any nails. All pictures in the house were hers, the deceased Mr. Bittle fond of landscapes. So Mr. Shepherd’s sat in the dark. I have asked him if he thought much about it. He said if ever he did, he pictured something alive in the crate, and once out, he dreaded he wouldn’t have the heart to shut it back in the dark.
At the end of ’43 he moved to his own house. A great event. Miss McKellar and I hung up crepe paper in the parlor and pooled our stamps to get him a set of sheets. What had happened prior, to make this possible, was that Mr. Shepherd got called up to do a war job. No, he never saw gunfire. He had the safest war job of the war, he said, which was: to oversee moving many shipments of famous pictures from the museum in Washington, D.C., to the Biltmore House. The Axis powers were having no end of amusement sinking ships and firing upon our coasts. Safety of our national treasures was the concern.
Mr. Shepherd was unsure how Uncle Sam had found him out for the task. When he’d applied at the Teachers College and was asked about previous employments, he listed “Consignment Marshal, moving art pieces to museums.” He thought it more reputable than “cook” and a decent cause for traveling from Mexico. (He feared they’d think him a bandit.) Some way the word passed. The War Board knew everything about us in those days. The officers called up the galleries in New York and were surely impressed to learn his association with Mr. and Mrs. Rivera, highly famous. So Shepherd was their man. It took months to see it all through. They kept him on with the CPS for the duration but he rarely had to travel far, nor to any place more dangerous than a room of naked statues.
The job gave him means to set a payment on a two-story bungalow on Montford Avenue that had stood empty for years. It was close by the stop he took for the in-town bus to the library and he’d often taken little walks up that street, for it had a cemetery up at the end and a mental hospital with nice grounds. The empty house struck him in particular. He thought it had an aching look about it, and for that reason chose it. Up until then he’d felt underfoot in every house he ever lived in. Peace and quiet was his only wish.
Soon after moving, he pried the nails off the crate from Mrs. Kahlo to see his gift. Pandora’s box you might say now, given everything that happened. The canvas itself was only some sketch she had snatched up from her bin, to carry out her plan. The gift was around the painting. There were the two crates, one inside the other, and the space between not stuffed with straw but paper, all the notebooks and typed pages taken from his room in Mexico after the murder. Hundreds of crumpled pages in all, needing to be smoothed and sorted out. But mostly all there.
Unbeknownst, Mr. Shepherd had been writing a book for years. He believed it had gone up in ash. But Mrs. Kahlo made the police not to destroy it. She was a powerful person evidently. Then hid the pages this way, not telling the author himself what he carried. Was it a trick on her friend, or did she only want to keep him safe? I can’t say. But she was first to see what the world soon would, after he’d fixed it up, filled in the missing parts, written and rewritten and stewed over it until he could stew no more. In due time it came to the Stratford and Sons publishing house in New York. That was Vassals of Majesty. It came out in ’45, before Christmas. That part is common knowledge, or ought to be.
So he was right about something alive in the crate, wanting out. Mrs. Kahlo did that for him. He’d about given up on life as a whole, going away on a train to the next world. If he didn’t take one other thing, she wanted him carrying his words.